Scott+CrellinLBF

I focused my attention on the school-aged children who took the survey in an effort to gather what I could about what engages them or doesn't when it comes to learning.** I was curious to see if the children who took the survey had answered in the way that I expected and whether their answers were similar too mine and other adults who too the survey. My hunch was that the answers would probably be similar regardless of age, even though individuals in the survey may be describing events that took place in college level courses. I started by applying a filter to the data to select only had answered question number three on the first page by stating they had either completed some elementary school, had finished elementary school, or completed some high school. I realize that there is a possibility that some who had answered that they had completed some high school may in fact be adults who had not finished high school as children, and when I investigated, I did find that there was one in this filter of mine that was 61 years old and one was 29, however the rest were 16 years old or younger. I applied a second filter to look at the rest of the group who had completed high school or beyond, again making an assumption that I will be viewing the responses of only adults this time. When I looked closely at the numbers, I found that most categories aligned pretty closely (within a few percentage points of each other), however 4 categories contained significant differences: Move Around, Perform or Present, Think Creatively, and Think Critically. In the following examples, I'll make an effort to analyze and explain these differences.
 * Executive Summary


 * Boring Learning**
 * 1. For kids it was more likely that an experience could be boring and involve movement than it was for adults.** 10% of kid respondents included Move Around in the Definitely Expected category of their boring activity as opposed to 0.6% of adults. I was initially skeptical of this finding-surely kids like movement and activity, how could an instructor have messed that up? "W" described a boring audio tour of Alcatraz, which I found somewhat astonishing. Certainly a tour of so famous a prison offered plenty of opportunity for interesting anecdotes about famous inmates. And what about the stories of escapes? "suhigeodevil" described playing golf during PE and hitting golf balls repeatedly. I guess if you don't like golf this could be boring, and additionally, the class was punished by being made to do push ups if they hit the ball too hard. That is sure to be a downer for any lesson. Note to self-don't make your class do push ups as a punishment for poor performance.
 * 2. Surprisingly, 16.7% of child respondents included lessons in which they were asked to think creatively in the boring category.** This is compared to only 8% of adult respondents who described boring lessons in which thinking creatively was Definitely Expected. I was very interested to see how the students described these boring lessons in which creative thinking was taking place, but upon further examination of their descriptions of their lessons, I saw no evidence of creativity at all. Searching the responses of the adults yielded a similar result. My only conclusions are that the creativity was implied in the lesson somehow, the question was somehow misunderstood, or perhaps our students are being told to be creative so much during boring lessons that they actually are equating creativity with boredom. That is a bit frightening.
 * 3. Not quite as surprisingly, 26.7% of students that said they were Definitely Expected to Think Critically also were describing a boring lesson.** This is compared to only 18.2% of adults. This finding and the previous one indicate to me that adult learners are less likely to equate thinking critically and creatively with boredom. So maybe there is hope for these young survey takers. Perhaps they will learn to find fun in lessons that make them think. There were several lessons described by children that I would assume contained a critical thinking aspect, however none of them described being asked to think critically. Most described either a boring topic or a boring presenter. One topic that I would have thought would provoke quite a bit of critical thinking was described by "alfredo". He said, " Learning about Hitler was boring. It was boring to here about him. Its just that it was not interesting. However, the most boring thing about this learning was the way the teacher was talking." This response indicates to me that this teacher, and probably many teachers like him, have the ability to make very interesting topics boring. Involving students in a bit of discussion, asking why they think things happened the way they did could have made all the difference in this type of lesson. Which leads me to my next point.
 * 4. There was a high correlation between adults and children in the category of Interacting With Other Learners.** Both the children (70%) and adults (71.3%) responded that Interacting with others was Not at all Expected during boring lessons. Also matching and also at a high percentage were the lessons in which it was Definitely Expected to Listen, Watch, Sit Still, and Remember. It was almost exactly the opposite case in the fun lessons, which I'll talk about in the next section. Both adults and children clearly enjoy interacting with each other. We are social creatures and we like to learn socially.
 * 5. Among the children, who were describing their boring lessons, boredom was often caused by a lack of interest.** The kids reported that either the topic was boring (6 out of 31) or the instructor was boring (15 out of 31). Some of the respondents said both the topic and the teacher were boring-a terrible combination, I don't know how boredom could be avoided in such a circumstance. "L28" said that, "The teacher makes us do the exact same things every day and that day just went exactly as i knew, i could have literally said exactly what she would say and plot exactly what we were going to do next." A teacher that is so predictable that she becomes unnecessary is bound to lead to boredom. "imax" said that, " Every day in class we were supposed to work out of our workbook and "listen" to the teacher drawl on in his monotone voice about dissecting something in which we never did." Four others also said that the way the teacher spoke contributed to their boredom. The ones not interested in the topic related that their boredom was because of pacing, lack of choice, the way the topic was presented, and sometimes just a lack of interest in the topic at all. Many of these factors are controllable by the instructor, something I am taking note of.

1. A striking difference between the responses of adults and children with respect to fun learning was the response to the Perform or Present category.** 63.2% of adult respondents included performing or presenting in the Definitely Expected column, while only 38.7% of children did so. "bacon" was the only child respondent to share a learning experience that included performing or presenting. She said, " my teacher wanted us to be able to better understand Shakespearean literature. In order to do this, she assigned small groups a scene from either Othello or The Taming of the Shrew. The task was to perform the scene in a different theme or setting (i.e.: a western time frame or have the characters instead have middle class mob member accents). Not only was this assignment fun, it also made the students think about what the scene was really about instead of just the rhythm and rhyme of the paragraphs." In my experience, children tend to enjoy learning activities in which they present when they are really comfortable in their environment. There almost always tend to be kids that are quite shy though, and those will tend to dread this type of lesson. Of course, the adults who then described lessons they enjoyed as incorporating presentations and performances often experienced these lessons as children. Do they remember fondly lessons that they once dreaded? Maybe in retrospect we can recognize the value of experiences that we previously did think we enjoyed.
 * Fun Learning
 * 2**. **Another major difference is the expectation that students Think Creatively.** Students only categorized creative thinking as Definitely Expected in fun lessons 41.9% of the time compared to the adults 66.7%. "JJ", an adult respondent described an experience where creativity was a requirement: " The professor specialized in artificial intelligence, and even though this was a beginning class, he offered problems and program assignments that were challenging, made you think, and required some creativity to complete." In the children's responses, fewer respondents described lessons where creativity was explicitly described, but they did include the following description of a highly creative lesson that was clearly effective and memorable: " My teacher gave us all a copy of Jabberwocky and first, we read it all aloud with the class. Then we moved the desks aside and got into a huge circle with everyone around. My teacher read the poem aloud and after we picked who was going to play what character. We had to analyze how we thought our creature looked like, sounded like and moved like. It was a lot of fun to be silly and just use imagination. After everone was assigned a role in the poem, we all recited it aloud. Whenever it was your creature, you would get up in the circle and recite and act your lines of the poem. I loved Jabberwocky because it was very different and fantasy like."
 * 3. The response with the biggest differential in the fun learning category was the Think Critically column.** In this category, children who indicated critical thinking was Definitely Expected only numbered 38.7%, while 70.2% of adults did so. I mentioned before that I felt that students may be getting the wrong idea about what thinking critically and thinking creatively means, because many of the lessons that they describe seem as though they would include this type of mental activity, but they are not listing it in their fun responses. Maybe we need to stop teaching kids boring lessons and telling them to think critically or to be creative at the same time.
 * 4. Watching and Listening were two categories that ranked very highly in both the fun and the boring lessons for both adults and children.** This might seem obvious, but I think it is important to note that these components that were high on the expectation list for boring lessons were also important in the fun lessons. It isn't the case that certain components are fun and certain ones are boring, but as has been stated previously, what made the boring lessons boring was content and presentation as much as the expectation of looking and listening. According to these results, it is perfectly acceptable to expect students to listen and pay attention to the teacher during a lesson, and still engage them in a fun way.
 * 5. What the Watching and Listening lessons that were fun did was demand some interaction from the students.** Interacting with learners and with the instructor ranked highly for kids and adults in the fun lessons, and quite low in the boring lessons. The boring lectures were described as being very one-sided, with the instructor frequently said to be droning on in a monotone, while the ones in which students were asked to respond, work together, and share their ideas showed up in the fun list.

**Implications for your own teaching and design work** First of all, it is my hope that, given the chance to take this survey, my own students would not be describing my lessons in the boring category. However, I can recall instances (however rare)where I have bored myself with my own lessons. What I am taking from this study into my own planning is that the way material is presented is of high importance if you are hoping to keep your lessons from becoming boring. I need to get my students to interact with me and each other instead of just lecturing. I need to give them the opportunity to get up and move around, to do as much hands-on work as possible, give them the chance to be creative and think without turning them off with challenges that are too difficult. I also need to stop making them do push ups when they fail to meet my expectations.